Happily
focusing her relentless joie de vivre on a life steeped in Bohemian
glamour, Judith Bledsoe is a light-hearted but passionate artist (and fond
of cheerily self-effacing humor –“serial killer” is how she describes her
penchant for moving briskly through periods of subject-matter obsessions);
the Hollywood-born Judith Bledsoe embodies the romantic and free-spirited
artist’s lifestyle that legends are made of. After a whirlwind
childhood as the daughter of a concert violinist with roots in old French
New Orleans, Bledsoe ran off to Europe at age 16 to discover her artistic
calling.

She eschewed the London fashion
design in which she had shown considerable talent (“I was too much of a
Bohemian to turn into a businessperson”), where she instead worked for
BBC-TV, creating live drawings, telling stories to children and eventually
illustrating children’s books. She came to find artistic inspiration and
fulfillment in the richness and vibrancy of European life, eventually
settling in Paris. For several years, she was affiche artist for Printemps
Couture in Paris, and it was there that she fell in love with printmaking.
Bledsoe worked for several years with the Imprimerie Nationale de France,
the official lithography print workshop of France, which later commissioned
her to create its official commemorative lithograph, titled “The Spirit
of the Print Shop.” Most importantly, in France Bledsoe found a culture
imbued with the spirit of joy and imagination that pervades her paintings,
lithographs, drawings, and “constructions” to this day.

Today she makes her home in
Montparnasse, a green oasis she describes as being “like a fairytale – It’s
marvelous to be able to live in this place, walk around barefoot…Sometimes
when the moon is full you rush out naked and take a moonbath.” She adds
playfully: “I have a reputation of being sort of mad, you see.” Judith
Bledsoe’s work has been exhibited all over the world, including, not
surprisingly, such exotic locales as Mallorca, Capri, Uruguay, the Canary
Islands, and in her home country of France. Her lithograph “Noah’s Ark”
was chosen for a UNICEF Christmas card design – yet it is that very
childlike quality in her art that belies the sophistication of Bledsoe’s
form of expression. Like her personal artistic “gods” Bonnard, Vuillard, and
Matisse, Bledsoe revels in the primitivist’s license to pour forth
uplifting, joyous, radiantly colored images, free from pretension or
cynicism. Flowers, animals, simple folk, fantastic beasts, carnivale and the
human parade of eccentric and beautiful life – all are vehicles for
Bledsoe’s unabashed love for living, for sensual delights, emotional
abundance, and soulful spontaneity.

In her own words, “My
involvement in art has come as naturally as breathing – I could not have
done anything else. It is all a matter of seduction, as most things in life
are. Inspiration grows out of doing the actual work itself, from working
steadily and keeping your sensitivity alive to everything.”“Art for me is
magic,” says Bledsoe, “although it’s also magic when someone falls in love
with a work of art, sees it and has to have it live with them in their home.
That’s what art is – a torrid love story. You have to create it with your
heart full of flowers.”

Leslie Schenk:

"Judith Bledsoe’s delicious oeuvre
exemplifies a great truth about the art of figurative painting:
representation is idea, color is emotion. This puts her one-up on abstract
painters who have only colors to work with, any of their non-evocative ideas
as arbitrary as Rorschach inkblots. Whether she depicts the infinite
varieties of the human face, cats or watermelons, idea is there, and
emotion, too, with the extra oomph provided by her extraordinary sense of
what happens between form and form, between form and color, between one
color and another. Most ingratiatingly, the emotion her paintings invariably
give rise to is joy. We don’t have many painters in our new millennia who
arrive at that. "

What’s more, she recently
created the decors for a Paris production of Jean Cocteau/Darius
Milhaud’s ‘Boeuf sur le Toit’ and, in a completely different style,
for another called ‘Broadway’. Ever versatile, she also delights
in painting, numbering and signing T-shirts as well as shoes and boots
commissioned by a fashionable Left Bank Paris boutique, no less,,
samplings of which have been prominently displayed there. Her
paintings have been shown in many cities across the USA (Las Vegas,
San Francisco, etc), and recently in several Right-Bank galleries in
Paris including
a show at the Mona Bismarck Foundation this summer.

What's next? A show in the
lovely western Paris town of Crespieres in October.

Whether
from her earliest lithographs to her latest paintings, collages or
sidelines, you live with a Judith Bledsoe opus, you are daily reminded how
good it is to be alive".